Frustrated customers were receiving replacement drives, but because Seagate didn’t know exactly what the problem was those drives suffered from the same problem. Then earlier this week Seagate confirmed it was an issue with the firmware and released an update.

Clearly that new firmware release was not tested properly as even though it may solve the 1TB drive problems it now breaks the 500GB Barracudas. On the support thread entitled, “Does the SD1A break 500GB cudas?” the symptoms are explained as a 2 minute BIOS detection process followed by inaccessible data on the drives.

Seagate have now had to remove that update and make its customers wait once more while it attempts to resolve that problem too.

Right now if you own a Seagate drive it looks like the best approach is don’t do anything until Seagate resolve the issues properly. It is also thought this new firmware update is causing problems for more than just the 500GB Barracudas.

Matthew’s Opinion
So it looks like Seagate rushed out a new firmware to try and put an end to the increasingly bad press and growing customer anger it was getting over the 1TB drive faults. In doing so it has just made matters ten times worse.

The storage company is now just coming across as incompetent. That support thread linked to above is 36 pages long. The messages not only talk of failed drives, but frustration with customer services not dealing with tickets and a total lack of communication. Some users have just given up and bought a new drive from a different manufacturer to start again.

So everyone is waiting for another update to hopefully fix all the problems. I’m sure Seagate have lost many existing customers over this and put off many more when considering which hard drive to buy in future. It also acts as a reminder of how important data backups are.